As you have realized, the Helpfile (the Fine Manual) is written by and for someone with a certain knowledge about Illy; some instructions simply imply something that a new user has no way of knowing. Illy herself is actually very helpful.

If the layer had been locked, that would have been a reason.

In a case like this, you may be stuck with corrupt preferences.

To try out whether that is the case without sacrificing your preference settings unnecessarily, you may close Illy and Move the folder.

If that does not help, you may move the folder back, and try the Other options; Item 7 is a lsit of usual suspects which may disturb Illy and prevent her from helping you.

Monika was right, I needed to select a brush from the brushes panel. That's certainly confusing for a newbie, since looking at the top panel it looked like I already had a brush selected. My previous experience with other Adobe programs certainly didn't help me realize the problem there. Small things like this make the Illustrator learning curve quite steep.

As a side note to the guy who decided to reply with "RTFM": I'm not posting only to gain knowledge, but to also show the areas that produce problems for newbies in Illustrator. This kind of information might be usefull to Adobe if their goal is to make Illustrator more accessible for a wider range of people.

At least in some older versions, a default Brush (such as 3pt Round) applies, which means that you (can) use the default unless some other has been chosen (when you apply the Brush, you can, or at least could, see it selected in the Brushes palette/panel).

Obviously I was fooled by that, unable to imagine such a strange change.

Maybe in the next version you will have to click a Start Drawing button to be able to start drawing.

Larry, there is nothing wrong with reading the manual. Some of us simply don't like doing that a lot. I'm more of a "hands on" person and many of the Adobe manuals are written in a very alienating way.

This situation is a great example of when the manual would not have helped at all, because I was under the impression I already had a brush stroke selected (as you see I'm selecting something right next to the stroke option that looks very much like a brush).

If the manuals rock your boat, great. For me the measure of a good intuitive program is that you can work with it without reading any manuals simply because it works in a logical straightforward fashion. When I buy a mobile phone its the same thing: I don't want to spend my time reading manuals, I wan't the phone to be logical enough so that I can find things on my own.

As I pointed out earlier, the reason for my post is not only to gain information for myself, but to produce information about the difficulties a newbie faces with Illustrator. I don't believe that second task can be accomplished by reading the manual.

At least in some older versions, a default Brush (such as 3pt Round) applies, which means that you (can) use the default unless some other has been chosen (when you apply the Brush, you can, or at least could, see it selected in the Brushes palette/panel).

that is still the case, Jacob. Unless you're working in a file that doesn't contain any brushes. Even choosing a width profile won't do any harm normally.

That was the problem. This causes Illy to bypass New document profiles which contain the brushes. Sorry, you really really should take some courses or read the manual. Illustrator is a complex software which means you cannot just use it. At least not when you expect proper results.

Why does it have to be like that? Does Adobe think a user who opens a jpeg into Illustrator doesn't want to use any brushes or is there some logical explanation for this kind of un-intuitive behaviour?

If you stumble upon a photograph looking through some obscure folder somewhere on the harddisk or in a DVD/Floppy drive, you will have to wakr Illy up, browse to wherever the photograph is, and File>Place,

instead of just opening the file with Illy, which in itself wakes her up, and relax while everything gets loaded in the right way.

Great change in CS(2).

Why have the option of opening the file if it fails to work properly?

This is just the way Illustrator works

And this part of the reason for my saying here, and in other threads, that you have to build a knowledge before you can use the instructions (and I am quite certain the issue mentioned here is nowhere to find in the Fine Manual/Helpfile).

I am afraid you are bound to get stuck quite a few times in the beginning, whichever way you learn to know Illy.

As far as I understand, it (still) works with Place, but no longer (for a long time) with Open (DoubleClicking from within Illy or RightClicking/whatever and Open With Illy, or whatever that is on a Mac).

That's what I'm suggesting: that when you right-click and tell Illy to open it (or, in this case, place it) you get the dialog with profile options, so it opens as a .ai set up as you want it rather than having it open as a .jpg (or whatever) document with no swatches, styles, etc.

I know, Peter, but according to Monika in post #15 you get everything (still/already) when you use File>Place, so that the issue is only with File>Open or opening with Illy from the outside. Which is it?